Signor Bracco, a Neapolitan approaching sixty years of age, has for the past twenty years worn gracefully the mantle of Giacosa. His works have been published in ten fat volumes averaging three plays to a volume, mostly comedies. Of these the most important are "L'Infedele" ("The Unfaithful Woman"), and "Il Trionfo" ("The Triumph"), both published in 1895. The best of his dramas are "Tragedie dell' Anima" ("The Tragedies of the Soul") and "La Piccola Fonte" ("The Little Spring"), which becomes the fount of life in inspiration for those with whom the heroine comes in contact. The best of his tragedies is "Sperduti nel Buio" ("Lost in the Darkness"). This brief enumeration gives no idea of the versatility of Signor Bracco, who in reality has depicted in his twoscore plays the ravages of carnal love in peasant and prince, in maid and in mistress, in priest and professor, in the underworld and in the overworld, in the cradle and in the grave.
Had the display of love and the passions that flow from it any confines, they would encompass Signor Bracco's imagination. Although denied what is called a scholastic education, he has studied science and philosophy, literature and art, but always with one object in view: to learn what human beings think and do when swayed by sexual passion. Not that anything that he has written can be construed as exalting it or as licensing it. On the contrary, the moral of the majority of his plays is that continence, like virtue, is its own reward. Although Signor Bracco would be the last to admit that he has not had an uplift motive in his writings, it is difficult to discover it. Nor does he point the way that will lead to avoidance of the suffering that flows, apparently with so much directness, from social convention, from privilege, and from the almost mediæval position of women in certain parts of Italy to-day. He is a realist of realists in fiction, but he is like a physician who is content to diagnose disease and leave to others its prevention and its cure.
A writer who dyes his products in Bracco's vat, then for contrast colors them with Sardou and Dumas, which, exposed for sale in the market-place, find avid purchasers and bring high prices, is Dario Niccodemi, whose comedies, especially "Scampolo" ("The Remnant") and "L'Ombra" ("The Shadow"), have had great success. In his last two books, "Il Titano" ("The Titan") and "Prete Pero" ("Priest Pero"), he gives evidence that he is keenly discerning of the new social consciousness that has developed in Italy apparently as the result of the war. "Prete Pero," while depicting the subterfuges of the church to accomplish its ends and the arguments that it uses to convince that the ends justify the means, portrays one of those simple, faithful, honest, transparent souls, in the shape of Father Bragio, who have been the pillars of the Roman church which no Samson has ever been able to tear down. "I wrote 'Prete Pero,'" he says, "as a journalist writes a series of articles or as a speaker makes a series of conferences—for a general idea; but I have had two, the first æsthetic, to sustain the principle that in Italy, as in France and in England, and, indeed, in every country agonized by this terrible war, one might make and make acceptably war comedies; second, moral, to prove that it is permitted to say from the stage in verse or in prose that which in the past four years has been said in journals, in speeches, in conferences, in parliament and in committees, which is: in the disorder of the social organization produced by the phenomena of war there have been sublime heroes and brazen-faced cheats and swindlers." "Prete Pero" showed that Signor Niccodemi has a nose for the favorite perfume of the modern reader, just as his "L'Ombra" showed it when he afflicted his heroine with hysterical paralysis and then cured her by the method which Freud originally called the cathartic method. Dario Niccodemi has not added materially to the dignity of Italian letters, but he has amused and diverted his countrymen and ourselves, and for that we are grateful.
Sem Benelli, who has recently had political life thrust upon him is, in common with many literary Jews in Italy, inclined to give himself a certain mystery of origin by concealing his antecedents. In reality he was born in 1877. Not only is he well known in Italy but in this country, where one of his early plays, "La Cena delle Beffe" ("The Supper of the Jests"), has had great success. He began his literary career as a journalist on a Florentine review, Marzocco. His first play was published when he was twenty-five years old. Although "La Tignola" ("The Moth") showed unusual quality of construction and contrasted with great force the artistic temperament with the world of the big business, it was not until "La Cena delle Beffe" that he arrived.
His great forte is to be able to put melodrama of the most lurid kind into verse, while depicting the lives and customs of the aristocracy of the Renaissance, whose standard of morals and canons of conduct were so unlike those of to-day. His heroes are always in search of revenge, his women of adventure. In his "Le Nozze dei Centauri" ("The Marriage of the Centaurs") he widens the field of his activity to display the conflict of christian and barbarian, but again it is the same thing, adventure and revenge. He does not trouble to be historically exact. It does not matter to him whether his characters are true to life so long as they are true to his conception of revengefulness. To accomplish his purpose he often strikes a note that reminds of his ancestors of the Old Testament.
The leader of all the younger Italian writers in drama and tragedy is Luigi Ercole Morselli, born at Pesaro in 1883. The commission nominated by the Ministry of Instruction to decide the most meritorious dramatic production of 1918 awarded the prize of six thousand lire to him. As a youth he studied medicine and later letters in Florence, but he soon deserted them and wandered in America and Africa. His first success, a pagan theme entitled "Orione," was recognized by competent critics to have originality and unusual dramatic qualities, but he was by way of being forgotten when nearly ten years later, 1919, a mystic drama based upon mythology, entitled "Glauco," appeared. It was produced in Rome and was greeted with every manifestation of approval. In reality it had an astonishing but merited success. Glauco, the amorous fisherman, in order to obtain his Scilla, braves the sea and seeks renown and riches. But, alas for human frailties, he falls under the enchantment of Calypso. When he returns to his native shore to claim his best-beloved he learns of the heart-breaking events that have transpired during his absence. Neither he nor Scilla can tolerate constant reminder of them and they disappear in the deep waves after one of the most remarkable farewells in modern literature.
Morselli does not follow either the mythological stories or their recent reconstruction very closely. On the contrary he makes the events of the legends harmonize with or conform to the laws that govern modern amatoriousness. His heroes react in their love and hate, ambition, realizations, in the same way as the people of to-day. His world is a mythological world, but it is scenery in which we live or visit, and it is peopled by men and women who love, hate, envy, portray, succor, and defend, quite like the modern world.
He has recently published two new dramas entitled "Belfagor" and "Dafni e Cloe." His fiction is a volume of fanciful tales called "Favole per i Re d'Oggi" ("Fables for the Kings of To-day"), and short stories which have appeared in magazines and journals.
Another young writer for the stage is Nino Berrini. The success of "Il Beffardo" ("The Jester") was so great that one may confidently look forward to his career without fear of disappointment.
Other successes in the theatrical world of 1919 in Italy were "La Vena d'Oro" ("The Vein of Gold"), of Zorzi, and in much lesser degree "La nostra Ricchezza" of Gotta.